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Sentinel data key to more robust assessments of seismic hazard

Land Monitoring

15/12/2016

ESA

The scientists from the UK Centre for Observation and Modelling of Earthquakes, Volcanoes and Tectonics (COMET) are now routinely mapping a great swathe of Earth's surface, looking for the subtle warping that ultimately leads to quakes.

Key to their work is the high performance of the Copernicus Sentinel-1 radar satellites. The satellite images are processed to show how rocks in a belt that stretches from Europe's Alps to China are slowly accumulating strain.

Movements on the scale of just millimetres can be noticed and thanks to that there are more robust assessments of seismic hazard. To be really effective, the team's maps need to be sensitive to movements of about 1mm per year over 100km.

Prof Tim Wright, the director of COMET, is underlining the prodigious volumes of data coming from the Sentinel satellites that are breakthrough to implement such system."To give you an example, in just one year of Sentinel operation there are 156 terabytes of data; whereas the entire 10-year archive of Envisat (a previous European radar satellite) has just 24TB. And we now process the data from the Sentinels automatically within a few hours of getting it”, he said.